Tehching Hsieh Takes His Time

One of the buzzwords of the past decade has been ‘mindfulness’, the description of a state of awareness in which we focus completely on what is in our head at that moment. The aim is to acknowledge and accept what we are thinking and feeling, ideally achieving a calmer and more attentive way of being. Providing a counterpoint to the ever-increasing distractions we encounter in daily life—largely driven by our phones and laptops (often simultaneously), with continual scrolling, messaging, emailing, and endless flows of social media, news, alerts, and games—mindfulness is something to be sought out or even to fight for. The world we live in does not encourage slowing down or stopping, so carving out time to pause, reflect, meditate, or just to do nothing takes planning and not a small amount of discipline.

I speculate that this contemporary condition is a key reason why the performance works of the Taiwanese American artist Tehching Hsieh resonate so powerfully today. Hsieh’s massive project that consists of six durational performances enacted between 1978 and 1999, each built around a singularly focused framework, is unparalleled in the history of art. Described by the artist as ‘lifeworks’, each performance considers the passing and spending of time: Cage Piece (1978–1979), in which Hsieh lived for a year inside a cage; Time Clock Piece (1980–1981), which required Hsieh to punch a time clock in his studio every hour for a year; Outdoor Piece (1981–1982), a year lived entirely outdoors without entering a single building or vehicle; Rope Piece (1983–1984), in which Hsieh and fellow artist Linda Montano spent a year connected by a 2.4-metre rope; No Art Piece (1985–1986), during which Hsieh avoided making, talking about, reading about, or looking at art; and the Thirteen Year Plan (1986–1999), which involved Hsieh making art without publicly showing it until the last day of the century (and his 49th birthday).

These works have been described as erasing the dichotomy between art and life more fully than any before. Hsieh devoted one year (or thirteen) of his life to each artwork, living solely within the austere parameters he set for himself. These extended actions, with their rules laid out in brief, simply typed artist statements, were carefully structured to combine or separate ‘art time’ and ‘life time’—for Cage Piece, for example, he did not allow himself to ‘converse, read, write, listen to the radio or watch television’, while for the No Art Piece, he simply declared, ‘I just go in life.’ Each performance required enormous will, focus, and meticulous planning, as well as rigorous documentation to prove that these phenomenal feats actually took place. Produced while Hsieh was an undocumented immigrant in New York City, the works also carry subtexts from this status and experience, including layers of official bureaucracy, often gruelling and repetitive labour, and restrictions on freedom of movement.

The announcement posters, artist statements, photographs, tapes, punch cards, and other items related to each performance have been exhibited and collected by several museums in recent years, including M+. In October 2025, Hsieh’s first retrospective will open at Dia Beacon near New York, designed as a sequence of rooms that spatially evoke the time spent in and between each performance. This exhibition, too, is a kind of durational artwork, its architectural concept conceived by Hsieh well over a decade ago—I recall him describing it in detail in a public conversation we had in Brisbane in 2014. Reflecting a life structured between art time and life time, it maps a practice of compartmentalisation that is now almost impossible to achieve in this era of multitasking, shaped by constant communication and accessibility.

The desire for laser focus and rigid time management has found recent expression in extreme exercise and health regimens on social media, which feature stringent workout, meditation, and skin care rituals timed to the second. These practices could perhaps be seen as contemporary echoes of Hsieh’s carefully documented, physically punishing actions; both appear to take forms of everyday life and break them into constituent parts that can then be isolated, enacted repeatedly, measured, and recorded. Yet while these routines promise superhuman physical and mental transformation, supposedly leading to ever-greater economic and social success, Hsieh’s works do not attempt to change anything for him or for us. His performances instead turn our minds towards what it means to be alive in the world and what we do with that. They are merely about being, in time.